Finding Mobility Opportunities — Opportunity Radar

Core Objective

Find businesses a specific operator can actually enter, validate, survive, and own.

Human Capital → Cash Flow → Owned Capital

Optimize for:

structural change × evidence × career edge × payer × capital heat × Power Pool × leverage × timing × assetization

Do not optimize for the biggest TAM, hottest narrative, most prestigious founder profile, or most fashionable technology.

Public-Example Safety Rule

Public repository examples, benchmarks, datasets and demos must use synthetic / fictional operator archetypes only. Never publish a real user's private conversation, profile, remembered history, inferred background or unverified personal detail without explicit permission for that exact publication. Never create a fictional profile obviously modeled on the current user.

Causal Reasoning Chain

Use this order because each step removes a different false positive:

Need → Change → Career-to-Founder Fit → Early Signals → Payment → Industry Formation → Capital Heat → Economic Quality → Power → Operator Fit → Evidence Confidence → Why-Not-Yet → Window → Pilot → Recurrence → Assetization → Real Option → Decision Ledger

Plain-language rationale:

• Need: removes technology looking for a problem.
• Change: a durable need is not automatically a new opportunity.
• Career-to-Founder Fit: asks which occupations already accumulate portable customers, transactions, suppliers, tacit knowledge or distribution.
• Early Signals: finds shifts before financial statements make them obvious.
• Payment: attention, downloads and funding can exist without a business.
• Industry Formation: separates a novelty from an ecosystem.
• Capital Heat: detects investor/angel belief, competition and resource allocation, but never treats funding as proof of demand.
• Economic Quality: checks margin, retention, CAC, cash conversion and concentration.
• Power: asks who captures the surplus after competition arrives.
• Operator Fit: a 95/100 industry can still be a 30/100 personal opportunity.
• Evidence Confidence: prevents precise scores from hiding sparse or weak evidence.
• Why-Not-Yet: forces the strongest hostile explanation for why the opportunity has not already been solved.
• Window: distinguishes a good business from a still-open entry window.
• Pilot: replaces conviction with a cheap reversible experiment.
• Recurrence: one sale is not a durable business.
• Assetization: separates ownership from selling founder hours.
• Real Option: prevents premature all-in bets and forces kill criteria.
• Decision Ledger: preserves the original judgment so later reality can falsify it.

Read references/reasoning-chain.md for the full causal explanation.

Workflow

1. Map the operator before the market. Identify payer proximity, tacit knowledge, supplier/channel access, selling ability, trust, assets, geography, affordable loss and entrepreneur archetype.
2. Run Career-to-Founder Transition. Read references/career-to-founder-transition.md and, for occupational comparison, docs/career-to-founder-map-2026.md.
3. Identify structural need and opening change. Look for cost collapse, capability downshift, new distribution, regulation/payment rails, adjacent-skill repricing, new infrastructure or a new bottleneck.
4. Stage the industry. S0 idea → S1 product → S2 talent build → S3 payer/revenue → S4 private scale → S5 IPO pipeline → S6 public validation.
5. Triangulate signals. Read references/signal-lenses.md. Use payment, hiring, supply chain, formalization, public-market economics, youth/campus when relevant, and capital signals.
6. Add Capital Heat separately. Read references/capital-heat-lens.md and references/hype-divergence.md. Report C0–C5, trend, investor breadth, capital destination, commercial confirmation and overheating risk. Capital Heat ≠ Customer Pull ≠ Founder Opportunity. Cross-check Capital Heat × Payment × Retention × Contribution Economics × Competition × Power Pool; ask whether customers still pay if funding stops.
7. Separate User / Beneficiary / Buyer / Payer. Payment and renewal outrank attention, search, downloads, social discussion and funding.
8. Generate concrete businesses, not sectors. Name customer, pain, offer, why-now, why-this-operator and first-sale route.
9. Score twice. Signal Confirmation Score = external reality. Mobility Opportunity Score = operator-specific fit. Read references/scorecards.md.
10. Measure evidence separately. Read references/evidence-confidence.md. Report Evidence Coverage, evidence quality, Confidence, Key Unknowns and Weakest Link. Never turn an 82/100 score into an 82% success probability.
11. Locate the Power Pool. Identify who controls price, distribution, standards, scarce resources, customer relationship, switching costs, data or other surplus.
12. Run Why-Not-Yet + Window. Read references/window-and-why-not-yet.md. Classify Opening / Expanding / Crowding / Consolidating / Closed to generalists and state the strongest hostile explanation.
13. Apply hard vetoes. Reject inaccessible Power Pools, weak payer validation, unaffordable capital/licensing, destructive regulatory/externality debt, structural Why-Not-Yet blockers, or no credible ownership transition.
14. Sell before building. Start with a 30–60 day paid pilot; prove measurable value and recurrence before standardizing.
15. Design assetization. Target expertise → service → SOP → automation/agent → proprietary data → software/product/network/brand/channel/equity.
16. Use Real Options. Pre-write affordable loss, leading indicators, confirmation indicators and kill criteria. Increase exposure only when evidence improves.
17. Return one verdict: START / BUY A REAL OPTION / WATCH / REJECT.
18. If maintaining the public Radar, append rather than rewrite. Preserve old judgments in radar/decision-ledger.md and snapshots in radar/opportunities.json.

Capital Heat Discipline

Capital is a belief / competition / resource-allocation signal, not customer proof.

Measure:

• financing velocity;
• investor breadth;
• follow-on persistence;
• capital quality (seed, strategic, growth, distressed);
• destination (technology, product, infrastructure, distribution, compliance, service, manufacturing);
• valuation/terms heat when reliable;
• M&A, IPO, shutdown and failed-fundraising evidence.

Use qualitative bands:

C0 Cold → C1 Emerging → C2 Building → C3 Hot → C4 Euphoric → C5 Unwinding

Always cross-check capital against:

payment → retention → recurring revenue → margin / power

Special warning:

If VC/angel funding stopped tomorrow, would customers still pay?

A hot category with weak payment is a classic false-positive candidate. A cool category with strong payment and an unresolved bottleneck can be an overlooked small-operator opportunity. If capital is hot but retention or contribution economics are weak, classify the divergence explicitly before the verdict.

Hype Divergence Check

For hype-sensitive categories, classify one state before the final verdict:

• Formation: high capital + strong payment + strong retention.
• Hype Divergence: high capital + weak payment + weak/unknown retention.
• Underfollowed Opportunity: low/moderate capital + strong payment + strong retention.
• Unwinding: falling capital + weak payment + weak retention.
• Mixed: evidence conflicts or is incomplete.

Read references/hype-divergence.md and compare against cases/failure-backtests/matrix.md.

Hard guardrail: do not return START when Capital Heat = C4 Euphoric and payment plus retention are weak or materially unverified.

Career-to-Founder Heuristics

A role is a strong launchpad when several are true:

• talks to real payers frequently;
• sees recurring expensive pain;
• knows why buyers reject existing solutions;
• has supplier/channel relationships;
• has tacit knowledge hard to learn publicly;
• can deliver a first paid offer before heavy fixed investment;
• customers can follow the capability without taking employer-confidential assets;
• repeated service can become a process, dataset, product, distribution advantage, brand or software layer.

Do not assume seniority, title, education, age or executive status improves transition quality.

Failure / False-Positive Backtests

A strong framework must attack itself. Read cases/failure-backtests/README.md and at least one relevant case when making a historical or hype-sensitive judgment.

For each backtest record:

Contemporaneous thesis → Capital heat → Payment evidence → Industry formation → Operator opportunity → Power Pool → Window → Counter-signals → Earliest kill signal → What remained unknowable → Verdict

Rules:

• use only reasonably observable signals at the time;
• separate category failure from company failure;
• record capital heat separately from customer pull;
• identify the earliest counter-signal;
• state what hindsight cannot legitimately prove.

Required Output

Use references/output-template.md and return, in order:

1. Operator advantage / entrepreneur-archetype map
2. Career-to-Founder Transition assessment
3. Structural need + opening change
4. Industry stage + as-of-date evidence
5. Signal radar with why each signal matters
6. Capital Heat C0–C5 + trend + investor breadth + destination + overheating risk
7. 3–7 concrete business candidates
8. User / beneficiary / buyer / payer architecture
9. Signal Confirmation Score + Mobility Opportunity Score
10. Evidence Coverage + Confidence + Key Unknowns
11. Power Pool and surplus-capture logic
12. Why-Not-Yet Test + Opportunity Window / Half-Life
13. Unit economics + first-sale plan
14. Recurrence mechanism
15. Assetization path
16. Leading / confirmation / kill criteria
17. Weakest-link analysis
18. Final verdict: START / BUY A REAL OPTION / WATCH / REJECT

References

• references/reasoning-chain.md — causal logic and plain-language rationale
• references/framework-comparison.md — comparison with common frameworks
• references/operator-archetypes.md — entrepreneur origins and operator edge
• references/career-to-founder-transition.md — career transition logic
• docs/career-to-founder-map-2026.md — occupational transition map
• references/signal-lenses.md — evidence stack
• references/capital-heat-lens.md — VC / angel / strategic capital analysis
• references/hype-divergence.md — capital-vs-customer divergence and anti-hype rules
• references/youth-campus-lens.md — early youth/campus signals
• references/scorecards.md — dual scoring and vetoes
• references/evidence-confidence.md — coverage, quality, confidence and unknowns
• references/window-and-why-not-yet.md — timing, half-life and hostile explanation
• references/business-design.md — pilot, recurrence and assetization
• references/output-template.md — standard deliverable
• references/recommended-reading.md — three-book reading path
• cases/failure-backtests/ — failure and false-positive backtests
• cases/failure-backtests/matrix.md — Capital Heat × Payment × Retention comparison

Interactive Radar Demo

A static companion UI lives in demo/. It is intentionally a decision aid, not a prediction engine.

The demo may calculate operator-side heuristics from career archetype, payer access, supplier/channel access, affordable loss, time and paid-pilot feasibility. It must preserve these rules:

• never present heuristic readiness as success probability;
• never infer live market evidence from user inputs;
• keep Capital Heat separate from payment / retention;
• preserve the C4 Euphoric + weak/unverified payment + weak/unverified retention → no START guardrail;
• use synthetic examples only in public artifacts.

For current-market judgments, the full Skill workflow and dated evidence still apply.

Agent Skill Installation

This repository is designed to be installed as an Agent Skill. The root SKILL.md is the canonical skill entrypoint; supporting reasoning and evidence modules remain in the repository so an agent can load them when needed.

Recommended installation:

npx skills add https://github.com/jupiterx0910/finding-mobility-opportunities

If an agent environment uses a local skills directory, copy this repository's SKILL.md as finding-mobility-opportunities/SKILL.md and keep the repository available as the skill's reference library.

The skill must preserve the Public-Example Safety Rule above when generating public artifacts.